That’s what we found out when we tried to bring in our first crop of feed corn.

The previous year, we had grown potatoes and I don’t even want to talk about that! (But if you’d like to know more about it, please click here.

I figured it would be a good idea to rotate the crops and we still had some of last year’s potatoes tilled back into the ground with the topsoil to act as a base. With the land all tilled and prepped (or so I thought) I seeded the ground with sweet corn.

This was when I should have contacted the good folks at Precision Farming Solutions LLC because they could have provided me with details about the seed varieties I never thought of.

After the corn started coming up, even I could see it wasn’t doing as well as my neighbor’s crop a few miles away. My leaves were turning a funny olive green color and the height of the corn seemed stunted.

This is when I decided to make my best move! I packed my lunch, jumped into my pickup and headed to Birdseye to see the real experts in Indiana, Precision Farming Solutions LLC.

DID I DO THIS RIGHT?

Luckily for me I had pulled an entire stalk of corn out of the ground and it had a respectable root ball full of dirt. I didn’t know that the lab at Precision Farming Solutions LLC was going to want to do a soil analysis first and foremost but the truth is they pretty much knew what was wrong with my crop just from looking at the leaves.

I had a Manganese deficiency! Who’d a thunk it? Was my crop going to be a dismal failure? It would seem that MAYBE I caught the problem early enough that it MIGHT be possible to correct it. To make it happen, Precision Farming Solutions LLC needed to come out to my place and perform a real analysis of the whole situation and take the soil samples in a very specific way.

Precision Farming Solutions LLC determined that I had to make some changes to my irrigation technique and that I had too much Iron in the soil and it was displacing the Manganese. It turns out that adding Manganese bearing fertilizers to the soil is not a very effective way to get it into the plant. Precision Farming Solutions LLC created a special brew for me to apply to the plants and the surrounding soil.

A MIRACLE!

Not a week later I began to see real changes in the corn. Gone was the discoloration that had been in the leaves. The stalks looked heartier and seemed to be sprouting up faster. They really caught up with the vitality I had been seeing in neighboring crops. I can’t thank the folks at Precision Farming Solutions LLC enough and I’m never going to attempt to put in five acres of anything again without getting a professional review from them. They just know everything about agriculture here in Indiana and they also have the things on hand you need to solve your problems!